Principal Platform Software Engineer

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) team offers the opportunity to build and operate massive-scale, integrated cloud services in a broadly distributed, multi-tenant cloud environment. OCI builds cloud products for customers who are solving some of the world's largest technical and business challenges.

OCI Container Instances (CI) is OCI's managed serverless container offering. CI enables customers to deploy, operate and scale on OCI without the need for container orchestration, through seamless integration with OCI Compute, Networking, Storage, Identity, Security, Observability, and Developer services.

We are seeking a Principal Platform Software Engineer (IC4) who enjoys building reliable software systems and solving challenging engineering problems at the intersection of Linux, virtualization and cloud computing. This role is ideal for engineers with strong software development and system administration fundamentals.

As part of the CI team, you will design, develop, test, deploy and operate software that provisions, upgrades and manages containers across OCI regions. You will work on Linux virtualization, hypervisor development and imaging for containerized cloud workloads. The role requires strong expertise in QEMU/KVM, container runtimes, networking, storage, systemd, security and OS image creation. Engineers on this team have end-to-end ownership—from design and implementation through production operations—and contribute directly to the reliability, scalability, and customer experience of one of OCI's foundational cloud-native services.

Required Qualifications:

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 6+ years of experience building and operating production software systems, preferably distributed systems or cloud services.
• Strong system administration experience in Linux, including bash/shell scripting.
• Strong programming experience in Java or Go.
• Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, operating systems, networking, and distributed systems.
• Experience working with containers, Docker, Kubernetes, or related cloud-native technologies.
• Experience with CI/CD systems, automated testing, and modern software development practices.
• Experience using AI-assisted software development tools to improve engineering productivity across coding, testing, debugging, and documentation while maintaining high standards for code quality, security, and engineering judgment.
• Experience using Terraform for Infrastructure as Code
• Strong debugging, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent communication skills with a strong sense of ownership and the ability to collaborate effectively across teams.

• Experience operating highly available production services, including on-call rotations, incident response, and driving operational excellence.

   

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with QEMU/KVM: launching and managing VMs, working with virtual devices like virtio-net and virtio-iscsi, performance profiling, troubleshooting.
• Experience with container technologies like Docker or OCI containers and container runtimes such as crio, containerd/runc.  
• Strong knowledge of Linux internals: namespaces, cgroups (v1 & v2), networking, and storage subsystems
• Hands-on experience with systemd: writing and managing unit files, controlling resource allocation, and understanding service lifecycles
• Ability to set up Linux bridges, veth pairs, and configure custom network namespaces and routing
• Experience with block storage: LUKS encryption, LVM logical volumes, and virtual disk provisioning (e.g., virtio-iscsi)
• Familiarity with security best practices for virtual machines and containers, including disk encryption and secure bootstrapping
• Experience in debugging with tools like strace, tcpdump, or wireshark, and analyzing logs. Ability to analyze core dumps with gdb would be a plus.

As a Principal Software Platform Engineer on the Container Instances (CI) team, you will:

• Contribute to the Container Instances Data Plane team, designing, building, and maintaining production-grade Linux hypervisor and guest operating system images used to run containerized workloads.
• Develop and maintain automated processes for creating, customizing, validating, and publishing Linux images in formats such as qcow2.
• Customize Linux operating systems at the kernel, systemd, networking, storage, security and package-management layers to meet platform requirements.
• Build and maintain RPM packages, software repositories, boot configurations and image composition workflows using DNF/YUM and, where applicable, OSTree-based technologies.